I was nine the summer Mama taught me how to bake a pie. It was an occasion, a rite of passage, a journey back into family history. The lesson was full of truth, pungent as our wild berries, liberally dusted with flour, and punctuated with the wooden rolling pin.
I stood next to the cutting board, my dress covered with a folded dishtowel, cinched around my middle and tied at the back.
“You take this much flour,” Mama said, dumping an undisclosed amount in a large bowl, “then you add shortening—about this much.” She dropped a glob of the sticky white stuff into the flour. “Now a pinch of salt. Take this pastry cutter and cut through the flour and shortening until it looks like cornmeal. Here now, you do it.”
I had no idea what cornmeal looked like, but I kept cutting through the mixture, certain Mama would give me a hint when it got to the right stage. After a bit, the flour and shortening were crumbly and coarse. Mama looked at it, nodded, and announced it was time to add the water.
“You never dump water into pie dough,” Mama warned. “You sprinkle it on, a tiny bit at a time. Use your hand like this.”
She dipped her fingers into a cup of water and shook the drops over the mixture, tossing it now and then with a fork. When the dough could be pressed together into a crumbly ball, she stopped, took about half of the mixture out of the bowl, and pressed it together into an oval on the floured board.
“Now you roll it out,” she said, “but only roll it once. Pie crust is like people—you treat them gently and they turn out tender, but if you keep pushing and pressing them, they’ll turn out tough and tasteless every time.”
I rolled—center to edge—all around the circle.
“Don’t worry if it crumbles around the edges,” Mama said, noting my frustration. “That’s the best sign of a good batch!” Gently we transferred the flattened dough into the pie plate.
“Now the berries.” The tart wild blackberries, frosted with sugar and flour and seeping with purple juice, tumbled into the waiting pie shell. We had picked them the day before, hunting through the burned-off growth in the woods behind the cemetery. I still bore scars from the adventure: hairline scratches laced my hands and purple stains outlined my fingernails. These berries were earned with sweat and blood and would taste all the better for our efforts.
After I rolled the top crust, Mama cut a curved line across its center. “Just like my Mama used to do,” she murmured. She crimped the edges with her finger and thumb, deftly creating a scalloped border around the pie. After brushing the top crust with cream, we slipped the pie into the oven, and Mama put on the teakettle—a sign we were to have a talk.
When the china cups were filled and steaming, Mama pulled two chairs up to the table and we sat. For the first time, I sensed that Mama and I were somehow equals and I felt special, privy to some feminine world I’d never known before. Mama stirred her tea and started to talk, introducing me to her past, the time before she was Mama.
“We were poor kids,” she said, “but we never knew it. Daddy and Mama raised ten of us on a small farm where we had a little garden, a pasture, and an orchard, all surrounded by woods. We always had fresh or canned vegetables, milk from a cow, and plenty of eggs, even during the Depression. And Mama always made pies. There were green apple pies and pumpkin pies, even mince meat when one of the neighbors had good luck hunting and got a deer. But the favorite was always wild blackberry pie. We kids called them ‘little creepy crawlers’ because in the woods behind our house, the vines crept along the forest floor, tangling themselves around stumps and over stones. We’d clamber through the prickly vines, searching for the sweet, dark berries and plopping them into our tin lard buckets. The smell of the berries, warm from the sun, was heavenly; and we ate as many as we saved, staining our fingers and lips with the purple juice.
“My mother baked the pies as soon as we returned with the fruit. She always hummed while she baked, flour dust rising about her like a cloud and settling on her hair and faded cotton dress.”
“Is that when you learned how to bake pies, Mama?” I asked, trying to imagine my mother as a young girl, scratched and stained with berry juice and filled with the same insecurities and sense of wonder as I.
“Yes,” Mama said, and her lips curved in a smile, soft with remembrance. “I was just about your age, and I remember I had to stand on an apple crate to reach the counter top.”
The fragrance of the baking pie wound around us, casting a spell of homey intimacy as we sipped our tea, sharing our heritage until the timer interrupted us with a rude buzz. As we removed the steaming pie from the oven, Mama sighed with satisfaction and said, “There, now that’s a job well done.” And somehow I know she meant more than just the baking of the pie.
The summer afternoon of my first pie was more than thirty years ago, and yet its memories are as sweet and real as the berries in the bowl before me. I think it’s time to call my daughter in from play and show her how to bake a pie. Perhaps we’ll sit and share a cup of tea while it bakes, and I will tell her how her great-grandma used to bake a pie.
“Mama’s Pie” by Pamela Kennedy, copyright © 1987 by Pamela Kennedy. Reprinted by permission of Pamela Kennedy.